Business entities try to promote reuse of documents by introducing a document management system. Products at early stage receive a paper document as an image using a scanner and registers and saves the image. Recently, many electronic documents are created by personal computers, and even they can also be registered and saved. In addition, recently, arbitrary pages can be extracted from a plurality of registered electronic documents and bound like a binder to form one electronic document. This will be referred to as an electronic binder hereinafter.
To realize such an electronic binder, conventionally, a plurality of different electronic documents are temporarily converted into a unitary electronic document format, and the converted electronic documents are edited to compose a desired generated electronic document. In this method, new electronic documents, which are completely separated from electronic source documents as materials, are edited to compose a generated electronic document. When the electronic source documents are changed, the changed electronic source documents are temporarily deleted from the generated electronic document, and then the changed electronic source documents are input again. If the degree of editing is high, a considerable labor for delete, move, and the like or many errors occur. As described above, if a material and generated document are completely separated, a labor is required to restore the original document.